1. John Carroll university FALL 2006 35
For more than a decade, Dean Luis Calingo
of the Boler School has spread the gospel
of quality management to government
and university leaders in a number of
Asian countries. This effort began when
the United States Information Agency
asked Dean Calingo to lecture on qual-
ity management in his native Philippines.
The educator was chosen because he had
become an expert in the Baldrige National
Quality Program, named after the late
Malcolm Baldrige, secretary of commerce
during the Reagan administration.
America’s National Institute of
Standards and Technology honors
achievements in domestic quality and
productivity with the Malcolm Baldrige
National Quality Award. The Baldrige
quality criteria have become synonymous
throughout the world as the standard for
the achievement of excellence in business
and institutional performance.
Calingo began taking the quality mes-
sage to the Philippines in 1994 and he has
returned every year since to coach business
and educational leaders on systematically
creating and assessing quality management
in a variety of organizations. He has done
a similar service in Vietnam for four years,
and he will go back to Thailand for the
fifth time this summer. One of his contri-
butions to Thailand has been to guide the
implementation of an academic accredita-
tion process for Thai higher education.
The dean has done versions of the
same teaching of quality assessment and
management in Indonesia, Mongolia,
Pakistan, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. In
each case of what he calls “my national
service,” Calingo operates with a basic in-
structional template, which he calibrates
to annual changes in the Baldrige award
criteria and customizes to fit the particu-
lars of a given society.
The leader of the Boler School says, “I
help train the quality assessors. The lead-
ers I work with go out into those lands to
diagnose various organizations, using the
Baldrige quality framework and eventually
impart those diagnostic skills to others. In
a place like Thailand, I probably come in
contact with about 100 leaders – senior
managers and government leaders – every
year. I’m teaching the teachers, and a mul-
tiplier effect results.”
He says that since the living expenses
stipend he receives is generally very mod-
est, his work in Asia qualifies as service
in his own and his students’ estimation.
“Most of these governments,” said the
dean, “cannot afford expensive consul-
tants, so they are pleased to have the
expertise of someone like me.”
Dean Calingo is bringing
quality management to
Asian nations.
A secondary benefit comes out of estab-
lishing relations with academic, govern-
mental and institutional leaders in these
nations. They, in turn, are eager to facili-
tate academic partnerships between univer-
sities in their countries and the American
institutions with which Dean Calingo has
been associated. Since he has only been at
John Carroll for seven months that kind of
development has not occurred here yet, but
the dean expects it will.
The primary benefit of Dean Calingo’s
international work in teaching qual-
ity management is, of course, that he is
playing a significant role in fostering the
economic development of a number of so-
cieties, which are responsible for the well-
being of many millions of human beings.
Dr. Luis Calingo